Muscle is crucial in many aspects of your health. Let’s learn why we believe strength training is essential to any fitness plan.
Muscle maintenance is one of the most crucial parts of long-term health and longevity.
While many become hooked on which diet is best — such as paleo, keto, or low-carb — we know that doing so leaves out an important piece of the health and fitness picture.
Nutrition is not the only way to restore your health; losing excess body fat and toning your body is another way. Good nutrition offers the framework for your body, but strength training instructs your body on how to use that nutrition.
Muscle loss
The average person begins to lose muscle as early as 25. Muscle loss averages 8% every decade from 40 to 70 years old, then rises to 15% after 70.
Muscle loss is caused by various factors, including aging, injury, cancer, and other disorders. Your muscular tissue plays an important role in the operation of your metabolism. Physical and cognitive deterioration might also result from muscle loss.
This muscle loss can be slowed, prevented, and even reversed in younger and middle-aged adults. However, muscle loss is hastened by today’s typical lifestyle, low testosterone and growth hormone levels, high stress, and the prevalence of type 2 diabetes.
At some point, the rate you lose muscle outpaces your ability to gain it. You cannot avoid the effects of aging, but you can postpone this process.
Muscle looks beautiful, but its worth extends far beyond its appearance. Here are seven ways that muscles can help your body and mind.
Muscle aids in blood sugar management
High-carb diets and sedentary lifestyles resulted in a diabetes epidemic (obesity and diabetes). According to some studies, two-thirds of the population is overweight/obese, and one-third is prediabetic or diabetic.
Obesity and diabetes are not usually linked. Approximately 20% of people with diabetes or prediabetes are at a healthy weight.
A ketogenic diet could be used to eliminate carbs completely and so solve the blood sugar problem. Alternatively, you might eat fewer carbs and make room for them by growing muscle.
If you don’t exercise regularly, especially with weights, you lose your ability to store carbs. When there is nowhere for them to go, blood sugar increases, the pancreas secretes insulin, and fat is stored. By gaining muscle, you are increasing space to store glucose.
There is also ample evidence that blood sugar and insulin dysregulation cause cancer, cognitive issues, heart disease, and accelerated aging.
Prediabetes affects more than one-third of the population, although only one in ten people are aware of it. Worse, by 2025, type 2 diabetes is anticipated to affect 64% of the population.
Muscle increases strength and endurance
During the first couple of months of a weight-training regimen, you acquire strength but not much muscle tissue. During this adaptation phase, your neurological and muscular systems improve their ability to use the muscle you already have, even if it is limited.
You get a lot of strength without gaining any muscle. After you’ve exhausted your present muscle’s strength limits, you begin to create more muscle. You see more shape to your physique after a few more months of constant weight training and a high-protein diet, and your strength continues to increase. You also realize that you can endure more difficult workouts and recover faster than in the past.
Although it’s exciting to observe how much your strength grows, the main benefit is how it affects your daily life. You can run up the stairs without stopping to catch your breath. You don’t need a cart to transport your groceries. You can even run around with your grandson with a smile on your face.
Strength and stamina are gained through developing new muscle fibers and energy-producing devices known as mitochondria – you produce more effectively.
Your muscles, ligaments, and tendons all get stronger. And your neurological system improves its coordination of different muscle groups, making your movement more fluid and effective.
Whatever strength you have now, if you don’t work hard to increase it, you’ll be weaker in a year. Your body will if you don’t work on growing muscle and strength.
Muscle provides support to your joints
Joint pain can be one of the main reasons individuals avoid weight training. Ironically, many people are in discomfort because they do not train weight. Try to look for other options on how to weight train without aggravating your joint pain. Weight training will eventually relieve your joint problems.
That does not mean that someone with knee osteoarthritis, in which there is no cartilage between the bones, will feel fine doing squats. They might have to find another way to move.
At the same time, you should not let anyone’s body component prevent you from exercising. There are numerous areas where you can improve. Increasing lean body mass has been demonstrated to treat some types of arthritis.
Muscle protects your joints from the impacts of incorrectly stepping off a curb or slipping on hidden obstacles. You will catch yourself if you have good coordination and strength instead of collapsing and injuring yourself. Furthermore, the hormonal impacts of muscle strengthening can aid in the regeneration of other tissues.
Muscle growth promotes bone growth
Physical strain or resistance promotes muscle gain and bone density increase. After working out, your body uses amino acids (along with other micronutrients) to create and repair muscle, and protein, calcium, magnesium, and vitamins D and K to form bone.
Although calcium, magnesium, vitamin D, and vitamin K are all important for bone health, your body will not manufacture bone unless you give it a reason. Resistance training is required to stress your bones.
If you’re losing muscle, you’re nearly certainly losing bone density. And if you do what it takes to create muscle, you’ll also improve bone density. Muscle strength nearly always translates to bone health.
Muscle aids in the regulation of body fat
Muscle burns almost three times as many calories per pound as fat. Your weight might not change as you lose fat while gaining muscle. But you will notice a huge change in your appearance while simultaneously raising your resting metabolic rate.
As with muscle atrophy, the metabolic rate declines with age.
Starting in their twenties, the average person’s metabolic rate decreases by two to 3% per decade. By 50, it had dropped by an average of 4% per decade. When you reach 70 years of age, your metabolic rate is around 30% lower than in your twenties.
However, your exercise and dietary habits are far more important than your age. A fit 70-year-old may have a higher metabolic rate than a sedentary 30-year-old.
It’s vital to note that if you do a lot of activity and eat a low-calorie diet to burn off excess body fat, you’ll accelerate muscle loss and reduce your resting metabolic rate. To build lean body mass, use cardio sparingly and focus on strength training and a high-protein diet.
Muscle might have an effect on your emotional condition
When you feel depressed or sad, you may slouch, lower your head, and turn your arms in. When you experience an emotion, you adopt its posture.
According to research, it also works in reverse: when you adopt the posture of that emotion, you begin to feel it. How do most individuals sit at work or while using their smartphones? They sit in the same position when they are depressed.
You might be doing a lot to improve the ergonomics of your workplace, but you can also prevent some of the impacts of poor posture by gaining muscle in a balanced manner. For example, when creating upper-body exercises for clients, we frequently choose roughly 60% upper-body pulling or back movements and 40% upper-body pushing movements. Clients can then concentrate their muscle-building exercises on improving their posture and reversing the impacts of sitting and scrolling.
According to the research, when people improve their posture, they also enhance their mental state.
Muscle increases self-confidence
There are few things more exhilarating than slipping into a new pair of jeans, seeing the definition in your shoulder, doing more squats and lifting more weights, hitting ten true pushups in a row, or executing your first bodyweight pull-up.
These physical successes can boost people’s self-esteem and help them achieve various other goals in their personal lives and careers.
Physical weakness has a direct impact on your mental power as well. A weak body and a weak intellect frequently coexist. So try to find a way to get physically strong if you need to be mentally tough for your career, business, relationship, or family.
The confidence you acquire from becoming more healthy provides you the confidence to achieve various other goals.
To Conclude
Make consistent contributions to your Quality of Life Savings Account.
Building muscle allows you to retain the same standard of living when you stop working, just as a well-funded retirement plan allows you to maintain the same standard of living after you stop working.
Strength training and a high-protein diet are the cornerstones for gaining lean body mass. Whatever your age or the physical and personal challenges you’re facing, it’s never too late to begin an effective strength training program.